]]>Tech companies from Apple to Tumblr, faced with a growing number of secret orders from the government, have resorted to a clever legal tactic known as a warrant canary: the “canary,” popularized by libraries in the wake of the Patriot Act, is a sign that tells the public that an organization is not being investigated by the FBI. If the canary disappears, well, you can assume the worst:

Now, the federal government is trying to snuff out the use of canaries altogether, telling Twitter that it is forbidden from using “zero” when it reports on security demands in its Transparency Reports, the semi-annual documents used by Twitter and other tech companies to report on FBI and NSA demands.

Warrant canaries are legal — Twitter

The fact this there is a fight over “zero” and warrant canaries is revealed through a close reading of the lawsuit that Twitter filed against the Justice Department this week. The lawsuit, which claims the government security demands violate Twitter’s free speech rights, repeatedly asks the court to declare that it may use “zero” when stating whether it has been subject to various secret legal orders from the government.

“We hope to convince the court hearing our case to give the first firm ruling that warrant canaries are legal,” said a Twitter spokesperson by email.

Through its lawsuit, Twitter claims it has a First Amendment right to use warrant canaries to say whether or not it has received various categories of so-called NSL letters and FISA requests — secret orders that can subject the companies to criminal prosecution if they even disclose the existence of the letters in the first place. (While Twitter and other companies accept the need to conceal the target of the orders, such as the members of a suspected terror cell, they insist the First Amendment lets them tell the public about what laws the government is using in the first place.)

So does Twitter have a case on warrant canaries? Do companies have the right to tell the public that the government is not using secret laws to investigate them?

In the aftermath of the 2001 Patriot Act, libraries across Vermont posted “the FBI has not been here” signs to tell patrons the government had not made secret requests for their reading lists. But the tech industry’s digital version of the tactic appears to be facing tighter controls.

Never tested in court

Apple was among the first tech companies to use a warrant canary in its 2013 Transparency Report. The canary, which read “Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” has since vanished in subsequent reports — though it’s unclear if this is because Apple has received such an order, or if it is due to a recent letter in which the government banned the use of “zero” in reports.

That letter, published in early 2014, came as part of a settlement in which the government resolved a lawsuit with five companies — Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo — and set out new requirements under which those companies could disclose security demands, but only in bands like “0-999.”

Gigaom illustration

As for Twitter, it insists that it’s not a party to the agreement described in the letter and, in any case, the requirements violate the First Amendment. And it might have a case.

“Warrant canaries have never been tested in court, but no case law suggests that they are in any way illegal,” says Nate Cardozo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “In fact, existing law suggests that if a court were to examine a prohibition on warrant canaries, it would likely conclude that any such prohibition would run afoul of the First Amendment, even in the case of NSL and FISA requests.”

Cardozo also noted that other companies continue to publish warrant canaries that flag various NSA and FISA procedures. One example is Tumblr, which is owned by Yahoo, a company that has been on the forefront of challenging the government’s secret surveillance orders.

As a result, these companies and civil libertarians will be watching Twitter’s lawsuit closely. The case will not only provide more details about government surveillance practices, but help to provide a better understanding of the warren of secret laws that the government has been using to demand information about citizens.

An earlier version of this story attributed Twitter’s quote to a VP of Legal. Twitter later said the quote should be attributed to a spokesperson instead.

]]>As the article stated, many traditional outlets are viewing Twitter purely as a means to promote their content. What they seem to be overlooking is that Twitter is where stories often originate and develop (Ferguson, ISIS, ALS Ice Bucket Challenge etc). Paying attention to ‘social’ isn’t about giving people what…

]]>On a recent visit to New York, I had a chance to catch up with some of that city’s new-media stars, including BuzzFeed, Quartz, VICE Media, Gawker and Tumblr. I’ve already written about one of my takeaways from that trip: namely, how some or all of those companies are looking at what they do through a different lens than many traditional outlets, by seeing their journalism as a service — that is, part of a two-way relationship with readers — rather than just the distribution of content.

This post is more of a round-up of what is happening at each of those companies, as they expand into new areas, which all of them are doing. In fact, my other major takeaway was just how rapidly some of them are growing — Quartz and The Wire just moved into a new space in January and have almost outgrown it, Gawker is moving into a new building next year, and Tumblr is taking over a third floor.

I should point out that my focus on these companies doesn’t mean they are the only ones worth watching in new media, by any stretch. There are dozens of other interesting startups and players both in NYC and elsewhere, including Circa (which just rolled out an upgrade) and NBC’s Breaking News — which recently launched an interesting experiment in location-based news — as well as Business Insider, Vox and solo operations like The Daily Dish and The Information.

BuzzFeed

Although it is still seen by some as a new-media startup, BuzzFeed looks a lot more like a well-established media entity when you visit its headquarters in the Flatiron district. The main editorial space, including the canteen, is about the size of a football field, and the same floor also has other sections for the business operations, advertising sales, etc. BuzzFeed also has a rapidly expanding video unit based in Los Angeles that is run by former independent video star Ze Frank, and the site is hiring editors and reporters for a standalone news app that it plans to launch soon.

Quick fact: If you happen to meet editor-in-chief and former Politico blogger Ben Smith in Madison Square Park next door to the BuzzFeed offices, he may regale you with fascinating details about former political stars like Roscoe Conkling, a senator and bodyguard to Thaddeus Stevens who has a statue dedicated to him at the entrance to the park.

VICE

Like most of the other companies in this list, VICE is expanding so quickly it is looking at moving, because it has used up all of the available space in the former railway warehouse it occupies across the street from a brewery in Williamsburg, the trendy area of Brooklyn. The office houses more than 400 people, many of them stuffed into a rabbit-warren style collection of video-editing suites, and hundreds more are being hired around the world — thanks in part to the massive injection of cash it recently got from A&E and a venture firm, which values it at about $2.5 billion.

Quick fact: Co-founders Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith, who started the company as a lifestyle magazine based in Montreal, have fairly tiny offices in the existing building, but the room where Smith was holding an editorial meeting when I visited has a large mural of a winter scene complete with a stuffed and mounted grizzly bear that was given to the company after a video shoot.

Part of the VICE office in Williamsburg — yes, that’s a bar in the back corner

Gawker

According to the New York Times‘ piece on his recent wedding, Gawker founder Nick Denton’s icy heart has been melted by love, and he did seem somewhat more gregarious when I met him for lunch in SoHo. He has even said that he sees Gawker as the “guardian of independent media,” a position he would likely have scorned in the past. But as optimistic as he is about the growth of the company — including its upcoming move to the Flatiron district — he is still consumed by the desire to make the Kinja platform the kind of disruptive force in journalism that he envisioned it to be when it first launched in 2012.

Quick fact: Many Gawker staffers and visitors say they will miss the great rooftop deck/garden at the building in SoHo, but Denton says the new office near the Flatiron building will have something even better — a two-storey, atrium-style greenhouse event space and workspace.

Tumblr

Although the history of Yahoo acquisitions is not generally a rosy one, Tumblr founder David Karp told me his company is happy with how the integration between the two has been going since Yahoo bought Tumblr last year for $1.1 billion, and says Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has more than kept her word. There was “a kind of forcefield” around Tumblr for the first six months, Karp says, but that barrier has since been lowered and the two are working together on a number of projects — including plugging Tumblr into Yahoo’s ad machinery, so the site can offer not just its own canvas for native ads, but access to Yahoo’s massive audience.

Quick fact: Karp, who recently turned 28, built a $1.6-million apartment for himself and his girlfriend in Williamsburg that was written up by net-neutrality guru Tim Wu in the New York Times. He is now single, however, so now that large space is mostly taken up by old motorcycles that the Tumblr founder is busy restoring.

Quartz

As mentioned above, the business-focused spinoff from Atlantic Media shares an office with The Wire, the news-wire style site that Atlantic recently announced it was absorbing back into the magazine, and recasting as a socially-driven element within the Atlantic. Quartz, meanwhile, has made Zach Seward director of product for the site — which recently launched an experiment in replacing the idea of a traditional home page (which it never had) with an email-newsletter style briefing — and Seward says more interesting projects are in the works.

Quick fact: The Quartz/Atlantic newsroom has a large video screen that tracks visitors to the site in real time, and also shows other interesting data, which during my visit included the price of Bitcoin and the status of nearby Citibike stands.

]]>On a recent trip to New York, I stopped in to see a series of new and not-so-new media entities, including Quartz (the business-focused site that is part of Atlantic Media) Gawker, BuzzFeed and Tumblr. And one thing that struck me about each of them — apart from the fact that they are all expanding rapidly — is that they are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people.

That way of describing it may sound jargony or deliberately obtuse, but the distinction is an important one — and it’s one that many traditional media outlets such as the New York Times have largely failed to recognize or have been slow to adapt to. And that failure could be their undoing.

Many media companies and publishers do occasional customer surveys or focus groups. But these tend to be primarily marketing exercises, and ultimately just reinforce existing design and content decisions that have already been made by editors. For the most part, such organizations see their job as coming up with great ideas and producing great content — a process that usually takes place with zero input from readers — and then delivering that content on a variety of platforms. In effect, a one-way relationship.

Even the NYT’s innovation report, as valuable as it is, makes it clear that as far as the newspaper is concerned, the web and social media tools are useful primarily because they are new ways of distributing and promoting all that great content its journalists produce, not because they change anything about the journalist-reader dynamic or allow journalism to occur in new ways.

It’s all about what the customer wants

Thinking about news or journalism as a service or product, however — especially a digital one — changes the way you think about your job. If you are Zach Seward, who has taken on the role of product director at Quartz, or you are in charge of the Kinja platform at Gawker, or you are building a news app at BuzzFeed like Noah Chestnut is, you are thinking about how to understand what it is that readers want from you, and how to provide it to them in the best way possible.

In order to do that properly, you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, and most of all use data to watch what your users (or readers, or customers, whatever you choose to call them) are doing with your product.

Take Snow Fall as a cautionary example — the wonderfully designed, wildly popular multimedia project the New York Times released in 2012 about the aftermath of an avalanche. It was obvious that dozens of designers and developers and writers and editors had spent thousands of hours on the article, and it showed. It was beautiful. But according to comments made recently by former NYT digital strategist Aron Pilhofer — now director of digital at The Guardian — despite the massive investment of resources, the newspaper had no analytics attached to the project (Pilhofer later clarified that the paper tracked pageviews and unique visitors, like it does for all its pages, but had no other analytics apart from that) .

In other words, this was a great piece of content that the NYT dreamed up and then pushed out the door, assuming — as it and so many other traditional media outlets always do — that it would somehow be guaranteed an audience. But as the paper’s own innovation report noted, nothing is guaranteed an audience any more. The balance of power between publisher and reader has been fundamentally altered.

Cultural change is never easy

Getting a media company that thinks of itself primarily as a content generator to act like a product company isn’t easy, as Nick Denton noted in a recent discussion with me about the struggles he and Gawker have had with Kinja, the company’s attempt to build a platform that takes advantage of the levelling of the playing field between author and reader. Journalists and media executives aren’t used to thinking about agile development or rapid iteration, and other such concepts.

But mostly, they aren’t used to thinking about putting the reader (or the customer) first. Journalists often seem to believe that their job is to tell the reader what they think is important or relevant, rather than thinking of journalism as a service that they are providing, one in which the reader’s needs or desires are paramount, rather than the journalistic instincts of the author. Approaching news as a service or — even worse — as a product is seen as somehow beneath them.

How do you make that kind of cultural change within a traditional media organization? I don’t really know, but appointing half a dozen longtime newspaper insiders to senior jobs, as the NYT’s new executive editor recently did, doesn’t seem like a great start to me, to be brutally honest.

There are some hints of evolution even at the Times: apps like NYT Now are an attempt to do things somewhat differently, and even incremental efforts like putting links to other websites on the front page — a top-secret project that no doubt took months to plan and approve — are worthwhile steps, tiny as they may be. Cultures don’t change overnight. But the clock is ticking, and more flexible players like Quartz and BuzzFeed have a head start.

]]>There have been rumors for some time now that Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform and open-source community, was looking to close a large round of funding that might value the company at $1 billion or more. On Monday, Automattic CEO and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg confirmed that the company has done exactly that — raising a $160-million round led by Insight Venture Partners that values the company at close to $1.2 billion.

In an interview after the news broke, Mullenweg said that he raised the funding because there is still a large market opportunity for the company to pursue, even though almost 30 percent of the web is based on the company’s blogging platform — including Gigaom (please see the disclosure at the end of this post). Web publishing is still too hard, the Automattic CEO said, and there are still billions of new users coming to the web.

Focused on users, not advertisers

Mullenweg also said that platforms like Twitter and Facebook are encouraging more people to create and publish content, but that WordPress is different because it is not beholden to the interests of advertisers but instead is focused on the needs of its users:

“There’s 78 percent of web that doesn’t use WordPress, and there are also billions of people coming online. Facebook and Twitter are getting people more comfortable with going online, but those users deserve a platform that is more theirs rather than advertisers. Everyone cares about users of course — no one would say they don’t — but our revenue comes from users.”

Mullenweg, who started WordPress in 2003 when he was just 19, took over as CEO of Automattic in January of this year, and said just a year ago that the company was fully funded and didn’t need any new equity. The financing he was talking about at that time was a $50-million secondary round that involved Tiger Global, a private-equity investment fund, acquiring shares from existing shareholders.

The round that the company just announced on Monday is new money — the first such round since the WordPress parent raised $12 million in 2008 — and it was led by Insight Partners, and includes individual investors such as Twitter and Tumblr backer Chris Sacca, as well as a special vehicle created by True Ventures, one of Automattic’s original investors.

Big opportunity in mobile publishing

In his discussion of the funding in his blog post, Mullenweg said that there is still a large opportunity for WordPress to make even further inroads into the publishing market, especially the market for longer-form content — a market it moved even further into recently with the acquisition of Longreads. The Automattic CEO also talked in our interview about the need to make mobile publishing more appealing.

“We’re not happy with the current tools — ours or others. Only a small part of WordPress functionality is available on mobile devices, so there’s a huge oppportunity there. Everything we’ve built until now, which I am very proud of, is still only available to a small part of the market. I’m very very excited about this next chapter.”

WordPress isn’t the only blogging or digital-publishing platform to have raised money or set its sights on a larger market: Tumblr sold itself to Yahoo for over $1 billion last year, and competitor Squarespace also raised a large funding round recently, as did Weebly. As publishing becomes increasingly digital, the marketplace for easy-to-use and dependable content platforms is likely to look more and more appealing — both for investors and for acquirers.

Disclosure: Automattic is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of Gigaom. Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Pinar Ozger

Meetup’s general counsel David Pashman told me in an interview Friday afternoon that his company decided to participate because it wanted to counter the organized lobbying efforts by the cable industry. He declined to comment on other startups that joined the effort, but I have heard that Kickstarter and Tumblr were also part of it. Some companies are set to continue their lobbying efforts throughout the weekend and next week.

Pashman said that the timing of these efforts was crucial: The FCC is expected to release a notice for proposed new net neutrality regulations on May 15, asking the public for comments. However, he pointed out that the commission will only be able to vote on any regulations that were already part of the proposal. That’s why his company and others are pushing for the FCC to include the option to reclassify broadband as a public utility under Title II as part of that proposal as well.

Reclassifying broadband under Title II is something that is vehemently opposed by ISPs, but Pashman said that it was “generally supported” by the community of startups that took to D.C. this week. “I’m not saying that it is the only way, I’m saying it’s important that it is included as an option,” he said, adding that from his point of view, reclassification would be “likely be the preferred path.”

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler went on the record earlier this week saying that Title II reclassification is still on the table, but Pashman said that it wasn’t enough to just threaten this as a possible remedy if things go wrong years from now. Likewise, he encouraged the tech community to stand up now and not wait for what he called a “SOPA / PIPA moment”, referring to the mass protest against the controversial copyright enforcement bill that only took off after the bill was already introduced in congress.

He added that it was important for tech companies to bring forward their own proposals on how the FCC could save net neutrality, saying: “We want to be in the position of supporting something.”

The dark serial killer drama Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller and based on characters created by Thomas Harris, didn’t excel in terms of ratings last year, but thanks to strong DVR numbers and critical acclaim will be returning to NBC for a second season on Friday, Feb. 28th. As a prelude to that, however, the first season is now available exclusively on Amazon Instant Video, and NBC wants you to watch it — all at once.

For NBC is currently getting ready for the #13HourDevour, a social media event meant to encourage new and old fans alike to binge view their way through the first season of Hannibal. Fans of the show — known as “Fannibals” — will be able to converge on Twitter and Tumblr beginning at 12 PM EST on Sunday, Feb. 23rd to marathon the series.

Not only will fans watching be able to interact with Fuller, members of the show’s cast (including star Hugh Dancy, who will participate in a live Twitter Q&A under the hashtag #QforHugh) and potential “celebrity guests,” but there’s the promise of winning prizes and viewing exclusive content. (Plus, bathroom breaks are built into the schedule — each new episode will begin at the top of the hour, taking fans all the way to 1 AM EST.)

The strategy behind the 13 Hour Devour, NBCU president of digital media Rob Hayes said in a phone interview, was simple: “How can we not only do something for the existing fans, but get people who are friends of the existing fans, or fans of the zeitgeist, interested. Binging is a great way to get fans involved.”

When asked if he was worried that fans who got hooked after a commercial-free marathon would react negatively to having to watch Season 2 at a much slower pace, Hayes said he wasn’t. “I think people understand what this whole binging phenomenon is — and you’re paying for that privilege.”

Of course, a 13 hour marathon of Hannibal might have its side effects — when I mentioned it on Twitter, a friend of mine commented:

@lizlet You know I love that show, but I imagine marathoning it would leave me pretty depressed.

But Hayes looks to Hannibal, and its role within the world of the web, as just one sign of how social media has changed television, especially in regard to how the cast engages with it.

“The conversation about talent we had two years ago is so different from today,” he said. “[The cast] really saw the value of how fans were reacting — especially when [the show] went on hiatus and the fan engagement continued,” he said. “There’s real excitement from the cast about it.”

According to Hayes, celebrating the fan engagement is about more than keeping the Fannibals happy — the show’s creators enjoy it as well. “From what they tell us, they actively look at what’s been posted on these sites — specifically, on the art side,” he said. “I think they just love it. “

]]>Berlin-based Somewhere has been around for a while (I covered it back in March 2012) and over the last couple of years it’s morphed from being a recruitment platform for hip companies to being more of a straight-ahead LinkedIn competitor, albeit with a much more visual, less corporate slant.

The revamped service certainly seized the attention of Gigaom Research’s Stowe Boyd, who reckons it could be “the start of something.” It’s a far cry from the legacy CV-driven format – users answer various questions about their selves and working practices, and each answer has to be accompanied by a picture. It almost comes across like a work-focused cross between Instagram and Tumblr.

And now Somewhere has announced a bunch of interesting details about its development, including the involvement of former Podio chairman and serial entrepreneur Thomas Madsen-Mygdal as chairman and founding angel investor, and the arrival of three more angel investors: Podio co-founder Jon Froda, and Postshift and Headshift co-founders Lee Bryant and Livio Hughes. The firm hasn’t revealed how much funding it has received, though.

Somewhere has also secured the somewhere.com domain, which is handy. For now, however, it remains in invitation-only mode. “There’s still a lot of work ahead, but we’ve found the balance and direction in the product,” Madsen-Mygdal told me. “[We have] lots of engagement from beta users.”

]]>By now, many of us who live our lives — or at least significant parts of them — online have grown used to the ubiquity of the “stream” metaphor when it comes to consuming content. It probably started with RSS feeds and blogs, but it has become the default for many services, and particularly social ones like Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. Where once there were individual webpages, now there’s often just a stream that scrolls off into infinity, like a highway that disappears into a distant horizon.

That kind of thing is wonderfully liberating, but it can also be distracting and noisy, and I would argue that Twitter is one of the worst culprits. I’m willing to admit that part of the problem is the way that people like me use it (or possibly over-use it), but part of it is also the lack of filters and other tools that would make the Twitter firehose easier to manage.

As media theorist Clay Shirky said so eloquently a number of years ago, the problem isn’t so much information overload as “filter failure.”

Twitter spends a lot of time and resources getting you to follow more people — recommending celebrity accounts, showing you activity in the Discover tab, and using smart algorithmic tools like @MagicRecs to show you who others in your stream are following. But it isn’t so great with features that help you manage your stream. For example, I would love an automated account that did the opposite of @MagicRecs and told me who I should stop following.

Not just a stream but a flood

Like others who adopted Twitter early and use it for their work, I have built the service up over the years to the point where it is like a second brain for me (or at least an extension of the first) and one that I have a love-hate relationship with for a variety of reasons. Among them is the fact that while an infinite river of information is a magical thing to have, the downside is it just keeps flowing, and that makes it difficult to pick things out of it that might be worthwhile or interesting.

That helps explain why some new offerings like Yahoo’s new Tech News app deliberately just give you a finite series of updates, much like you get with a newspaper. One of the psychological benefits of this approach is the feeling of completion you get — you can’t finish Twitter or the internet. That’s simultaneously fantastic and disturbing (I often find myself scrolling backwards through time on Twitter because I am convinced that I have missed something worthwhile).

Alexis Madrigal wrote about this phenomenon recently for The Atlantic, and argued that 2013 might be the year that the obsession with streams would start to wane — a prediction that comes just a few years after TechCrunch declared that everything was becoming a stream. As Madrigal put it, the downside of the stream approach is that everyone is now overwhelmed, but no one wants to admit it:

“Everyone is (over)optimizing for the stream. That makes the media Internet a very fragile place. It’s like a story of ecosystem collapse where once the delicate balances get thrown off, the biome begins to veer off in crazy directions, everything running around like Texas crazy ants.”

You can have too much of a good thing

Part of my Twitter problem is sheer volume, which is why I was interested to read Charlie Warzel’s recent post at BuzzFeed, in which he describes nuking his entire Twitter stream — made up of about 1,800 accounts he had followed over the years — and rebuilding it from scratch. I follow over 3,000 people and media outlets on Twitter, so I can sympathize with Warzel’s pain, and have often felt the desire to delete everyone and start again at the beginning. But it just seems like so much effort that I don’t do it.

I felt much the same way about my Facebook account, where I had deliberately (and, as it turns out, wrongly) accepted almost every friend request I received, even if I didn’t know the person very well. In a binge of unfriending I wrote about last year, I disconnected myself from more than 800 people, or about 80 percent of the people I was “friends” with. And I can say that it improved the experience dramatically for me — although I still get plenty of Facebook ad spam, so my problem isn’t completely solved.

Using Twitter lists is one way of slicing up your stream and bundling it into topics or themes, and in fact I would barely be able to use the service at all if it wasn’t for lists (I have a few public ones and some private ones). Apps like Tweetdeck make it relatively easy to create new lists, add people to them and view those lists as columns — but every time Twitter updates an app, especially its mobile ones, it seems to make lists harder to find and use rather than easier.

Managing the stream is too hard

It’s not that unfollowing people on Twitter is difficult — it’s just a click of a button. But first I would have to decide why I was unfollowing that person, and that would require thinking about why I followed them in the first place. I would have to look at their stream and reconsider their value, and I would have to do that 3,000 times. It’s like cleaning out the garage or indexing your photos; you know that you should do it, but it just seems so daunting that you never get around to it.

That helps explain my interest in tools that help you track who has unfollowed you, and others that show people you follow who aren’t very active. One of my favorite such analytic services is ThinkUp, which was created by former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani and former Six Apart executive Anil Dash, and allows you to slice and dice your stream in a number of ways, to see which accounts you engage with most actively and who is providing value vs. noise (Salesforce CTO J.P. Rangaswami had some great thoughts about filters in a recent blog post).

For Twitter, one problem is that the company seems focused on adding millions of news users — and oceans of new content through deals with TV networks, etc. — rather than on making things easier for existing users, in part because building up its user base helps justify its multibillion-dollar market value. But if users ultimately just find themselves overwhelmed, that could be a Faustian bargain. The stream can be a harsh mistress.